Steev and Nick discuss their experiences with the cinema and ask whether the magic of the place has been diminished by the way the industry has treated itself, or whether your hosts are just too jaded to take it on its own, rejigged terms. In a time where we can have a big enough screen at home, does the cinema still deserve to be the ultimate place to take in Hollywood’s finest?

Oxygen is in plentiful supply. There is enough to go around for everyone, and doesn’t seem to have a problem supporting even more, despite the distant threat it could all be taken away. Some people like to take up more oxygen than they really need, and one can find themselves wondering whether the hoarders are really contributing enough to make that stockpiling worthwhile. And while you’re welcome to decide for yourself whether Unanswered qualifies, why not consider comparing the analogy to money.

In our twenty-fifth show we expand our horizons beyond amateur philosophy by also trying our hands at amateur history and amateur economics, to really drive home how little we know about the stuff we try to talk about.

Gasp you will as we wonder how the idea of money started, who drew the notes, and how that person got paid. We also invent unprofitable businesses, discuss what we did with our pocket money, as well as consider the value of things when we have to work to afford them.

Communication breakdown on several fronts lead to this episode of Unanswered. The show was intended to be a discussion on the differences between loneliness and solitude, and the upsides to be found in the latter. Somehow the conversation stuck around an aside about introverts and extroverts. Additionally, the traditional recording set-up on Nick’s side failed, causing us to rely on the less than stellar Skype feed resulting in the occasional appearance of Robonick.

Recorded in a month all about Europe, Steev and Nick freewheel into a conversation about the UK’s political climate, and in particular the debate around immigration.

Captured before the European Parliament elections and released after the dust had settled, this episode is as much a snapshot of a specific moment as it is a record of our own political perspectives and prejudices.

Find out what the deal is with Question Time, whether political parties have their own official dance, if suburban sprawls are our utopia, and which one of us would love to live near a cheese shop.

Naked as the day you were born is the only true day you were naked as the day you were born. Before long, however, it’s clear we’ve got to cover up: first for warmth and to stop our untrained selves from defecating where we stand; and later, because as much as our egos don’t want to hear it, the rest of the world isn’t particularly interested in dealing with an unwarranted state of clotheslessness.

If there’s nothing actually wrong with the human form, and if it’s as beautiful as artists and Gok Wan insist, how come we get so bothered when even the random, non-sexual parts of it are exposed?

In an awkward episode Nick and Steev discuss the awkwardness of being born, tread a careful line while talking awkwardly about breasts, and look at a few other situations where states of nudity outside of the home are awkward at best.

Empathy in a world of sympathy must feel like an apologist in a room full of outrage, whilst sympathy in a world of empathy must feel like a narcissist in a room without a reflective surface. It’s just as well the world is much larger than a four metre squared patch of carpet otherwise the complexity of humans could get a bit noticed.

It’s a heady mix of the silly and serious as tragedy, charity, plasters, Harvard, and privilege checking are all quickly examined, before Steev and Nick push the concept of empathy into tougher territory—asking is it possible to have empathy with the most loathed people in our society, and if so what does that say about us?

It took Steev and Nick thirteen months to record their first podcast after deciding they would make one together. Twenty episodes of Unanswered later they get around to tackling procrastination as a topic. They are well suited to discuss it.

Is procrastination a manifestation of boredom, distractibility or fear? What are the barriers procrastinators build for themselves to avoid doing the things which really matter? Can displacement activities themselves be productive? Steev and Nick ask a lot of questions of themselves in our most personal episode so far.

Returning from a month’s hiatus turns out to be a tricky thing, thanks to the disruptive power of moving home. Steev’s moving moving experience is the starting point for a discussion on what home means to us.

We look at the various places we call home, and try to figure out what turns a collection of bricks and stuff, or roads and places, into an emotional connection.

Friendship! Effort! Victory!—Max takes a look at the history and inner workings of the stories inside the pages of Japan’s long-running manga compendium Shonen Jump.

We’d also recommend you take a listen to Unanswered’s spiritual parent, Back to Work, from Dan Benjamin and Merlin Mann. The show discusses issues around productivity and getting back to doing the things we love.

Thanks for being a listener. We hope we make part of your balanced podcast diet.

Passing it on

If you’ve enjoyed one of our shows don’t be afraid to tell either Nick or myself (or even the Unanswered account) on Twitter, or by leaving a comment here on the site. If we’ve moved you to blog about a topic we’ve discussed, send us the link and we’ll share it. We’ll be your best friend forever if you spread the word about us wherever you are online.

Reviews on iTunes or your podcatcher of choice are also gratefully received.

We are all prone to bouts of wondering what it is we’re supposed to do with our lives, and it seems one of the most popular answers is to be happy. Our governments and corporations wish for us to be happy as much as our nearest and dearest do.

Whilst all this goodwill is lovingly received, can we even begin to understand what our pursuit of happiness really means? Why is happiness the emotion that wins out amongst all others, and do we risk confusing it with a sense of contentment?

It’s a densely packed hour as Steev and Nick discuss emotions, the value of dogs, and share their own perspectives and experiences from their happiness pursuits.

“You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression” so the infamous phrase goes, and whilst you often have it told to you before a job interview or going on a date, it also applies to a good book or this year’s must-watch box-set TV show.

Inspired in part by the fuss whipped up around the farewell of Breaking Bad, Steev and Nick delve into the dangers of time-shifting our entertainment diet, either by circumstance or by design. If everybody is talking about a thing you haven’t yet seen but want to check out at some point, is it possible to enjoy it unspoiled by others steamrolling their experiences over it? Is it your fault if you chose to do something else instead of grinding through the popular culture checklist, and do you deserve to have the kimono flashed open in your face for not keeping up with the rest of the class?

We try very hard not to spoil the TV shows and movies we cite along the way.

Unanswered’s own Nicolas Papaconstantinou has been thinking aloud on his blog, and it has some pertinence to our discussion about privacy on Show 15.

Nick wonders how we’ve come to accept informal snooping into the parts of our personal lives we choose to share online as A Thing That Happens Now when looking for work. If we wouldn’t accept actually being followed around as we go about our private lives, how is it fine to lurk amongst our digital shadows?

…how is it okay for an employer to Google an applicant or look at their Facebook account and use information they see there, existing outside of a working context, to inform their decision about whether or not they will employ that person?

I’m not strictly talking about those cases, often reported in the media or shared in offices as hilarious cautionary tales with black-and-white causality, of hapless applicants writing criminal nonsense on their Twitter account, or Facebook galleries full of photos of them getting drunk and disorderly in University bars with their friends. However, these are worth addressing.

My stance on the former is: if the things they are writing are actually criminal, we already have a legal system that can penalise them quite effectively.

On the latter: yes, most places have some sort of public decency clause in their employment contracts, and employers want to protect themselves from “bad” public behaviour, but here we’re faced with the conflict between what is possible or not possible, and what is right or wrong… The “real world” analogue of Googling somebody—seeing what they’ve left out in the digital wild about themselves—is following them on the street; seeing what they do out in public or pseudo-public where anyone can see. Resources-wise, the social internet makes one a matter of a couple of minutes and a half-dozen easy searches, while the other is far more labour intensive, but the goal and result are pretty much the same.

If that analogue is right, can it be inferred that the reason companies don’t do this in meatspace, and didn’t do it before the social internet, is because it wasn’t practical, rather than because it’s actually a bit icky and outside the bounds of what an organisation should be doing?

Despite themselves and their often inflated sense of self-importance, humans do a relatively good job of all getting along. That is, unless one of their contemporaries is proving to be an obstacle purely by performing the duties their employer has bestowed upon said ghastly hurdle.

Surely it is not too much to ask to appeal to the hurdle’s better nature and sense of fairness? Well, yes you can ask. Questions have a habit of providing unwelcome answers, however. And the wind cries Jobsworth.

Steev and Nick try and deconstruct the title of Jobsworth and the people who wield it. Learn about That’s Life!, porcelain hearts, The Great British Traffic Warden, supposed power trips, and who amongst us can genuinely claim to win at life.

With only days to go before the birth of his first child, Nick is in the mood to talk about some of the big changes in life and how we come to make them. Specifically, we discuss the milestones we pass in our relationships, why the decision to pass them seems like a big deal at the time, and why the weight of expectation can have a detrimental effect.

Also, learn more than you’d ever wish to know about caffeine, what would terrify the versions of us from ten years ago, and which of us gurns at a camera that isn’t there.

The neighbourhood, let alone the world or the universe, is a pretty large place compared to a single solitary human being who would struggle to put a dent in anything most days. If we are so powerless to affect change wouldn’t it be more comforting to know that someone or something is making the dents for us?

Luck is the term we commonly use to give reason to the things happening in our lives which we care not to analyse. Why are we so prepared to let luck take the wrap for the wrong stuff, and take credit for those times we managed to dent our worlds for the better?

When a person finds themselves offended it is described as them ‘taking offence’. We should be thankful for this grammatical distinction for offence, like beauty, lies in the eye of the beholder.

This episode explores the modern malaise of militant indignation where the simple act of getting the hump somehow means this poor, fictional victim awards themselves the ability to force the rest of the world to adapt. Several examples from the world of comedy are brought into play, as well as racism, some bigoted woman, trigger warnings, and the Boyle family Christmas.

Trigger warning: this episode contains words that could offend if the listener has no grasp of the concept of context.

Domi listened to Unanswered Show 11, “Being A Fan”, and because it’s a subject area she’s very interested in she found it frustrating when the episode finished when there was still more to discuss.

(This is one of the most lovely things to hear, when you’re doing a show like this. The best podcasts are the ones that I find myself trying to get involved with the conversation as I listen, sometimes months after the presenters have moved on!)

As people/ fans get more and more used to companies asking for, and listening to, their opinions there is naturally going to come a time when they utilise effect platforms to give their opinion, even when unprompted or unwanted. They will then keep giving their opinion, louder and louder until they get the reaction they have become a custom to.

Oh, and in true Unanswered fashion, Domi manages to fit in some anecdotal over-sharing too!

When a like turns into a devotion and becomes a part of your emotional well-being, it’s possible you have become a fan.

You enjoy, support and loyally follow an individual or group making something entertaining, or succeeding or failing in a sport. And that’s OK because you’re allowed to enjoy the fruits of another’s hard work. The person who worked hard to make it wants you to enjoy it. It’s a simple relationship.

However, how much devotion is unhealthy and where can the relationship break down? Can one’s investment grow to create hopes that can never be met? Does our fanaticism threaten to spoil our fancy?

Nick and Steev use a few of their own examples to consider the faults in being a fan.

Nick has taken a look through his many swanky notebooks full of ideas, thoughts and observations. Starting along the path of youthful exuberance, and whilst the tenth episode started with the intention to be a bit of a round robin, we ended up focusing on affairs of the heart.

We dissect the hopeless romantic; deconstruct the honeymoon period; and decide what defines an actual relationship from a schoolyard fling. We also talk crushes and crazy attention-grabbing schemes, and peek behind the curtain of marriage.

Filed under: Preview Tagged: preview, unanswered]]>https://unansweredpodcast.wordpress.com/2013/03/28/show-10-preview/feed/0unansweredpodcastOwen Hatherley on Eastleigh in the face of the 2013 by-electionhttps://unansweredpodcast.wordpress.com/2013/03/08/owen-hatherley-eastleigh-guardian/
https://unansweredpodcast.wordpress.com/2013/03/08/owen-hatherley-eastleigh-guardian/#respondFri, 08 Mar 2013 11:00:34 +0000http://unansweredpodcast.wordpress.com/?p=344Continue reading →]]>The day before the Eastleigh by-election, Owen Hatherley—whom we mention in Show 9—posted a Comment is Free piece on Guardian Online entitled “How Labour got lost in Eastleigh’s unplanned sprawl”.

What appears on the surface to be a nondescript, innocuous town is actually a hub for a remarkable sprawl created in spite of past political manoeuvring which attempted to build an über-city on Hampshire’s south coast and would have swallowed Eastleigh whole. Whilst the article exists in the context of the parliamentary constituency of Eastleigh, and reflects on its political persuasions, there’s also a breezy summary of South Hampshire’s planning history, making it a useful companion piece to Show 9’s show notes.

In 1965, the Harold Wilson government commissioned the town planner Colin Buchanan to prepare the South Hampshire Study. Southampton and Portsmouth were growing, with their port and manufacturing industries increasingly important, and beginning to worry London, which now faced a potential rival in the south-east. Left unplanned, this would cause what in Outrage, a travelogue from Southampton to Carlisle, the writer Ian Nairn called “subtopia”, a thoughtless mass of indeterminate detritus strewn unthinkingly across arterial roads. Instead, the planned Solent City would be a consciously modern metropolis built in the gaps between the two historic port cities. Needless to say, locals and local government in the sleepy Hampshire towns that would take most of the expansion were mortified at the prospect of becoming part of some modernist Greater Southampton, and fought the plans until they were abandoned – though many of the ideas in Buchanan’s grid were soon re-used in Milton Keynes, to great success.

Filed under: Asides Tagged: link, show relevant]]>https://unansweredpodcast.wordpress.com/2013/03/08/owen-hatherley-eastleigh-guardian/feed/0steevbishopChanges to the Unanswered schedulehttps://unansweredpodcast.wordpress.com/2013/03/08/changes-to-the-unanswered-schedule/
https://unansweredpodcast.wordpress.com/2013/03/08/changes-to-the-unanswered-schedule/#respondFri, 08 Mar 2013 09:30:58 +0000http://unansweredpodcast.wordpress.com/?p=335Continue reading →]]>The Unanswered podcast will be moving to a monthly schedule. This means our next show will be released on Wednesday 3rd April.

Recording a new show every two weeks has been fun. Time spent chewing the cud with a friend is always time well spent, and if it weren’t for the realities of editing there wouldn’t be a need for change.

The show’s premise is to take on a subject with little to no opportunity to research, to see what occurs to us and where it leads. The conversation comes easily, but the challenge is in taking raw audio over two hours in length (and close to three on occasion) and distill that into an enjoyable, manageable running time. I had hoped for 30–40 minutes, but it seems the natural length is around 50 minutes.

The editing process is pretty ruthless, first by cutting out large chunks and then going back to take out repetition, hesitation and conversational dead ends. Including countless tiny snips because—believe me—there’s only so many times you’d want to hear the words ‘um’ and ‘err’. This takes hours to do. To find those hours in a window the size of slightly fewer than 14 days is very tricky and has been at the expense of other plans. By recording once a month, I get two additional weeks to make time for the editing, and hopefully to get the voices from the last episode out of my head in enough time to feel ready to make the next one.

Thanks for being a listener. We hope we make part of your balanced podcast diet.

Passing it on

If you’ve enjoyed one of our shows don’t be afraid to tell either Nick or myself (or even the Unanswered account) on Twitter, or by leaving a comment here on the site. If we’ve moved you to blog about a topic we’ve discussed, send us the link and we’ll share it. We’ll be your best friend forever if you spread the word about us wherever you are online.

Reviews on iTunes or your podcatcher of choice are also gratefully received.

Cities: Hulking great machines keeping its populace in sportswear and takeaway coffees, hiring people to sell sportswear and takeaway coffees. With our attention so divided between threats, opportunities and more bus stop ads than you could shake Adam Sandler at, are we able to focus on anything but the next few minutes?

Once only residing in Nordic legend, trolls have rampantly multiplied and found new, fertile ground along the Information Superhighway. As the world started to connect, and as technologies and services grew to house it, the human race re-encountered behaviours that the rigours of meatspace had started regulating years before.

What’s troubling is, as more significant and influential people are thrust into online confrontations they weren’t expecting, we’re all struggling for a term to describe it. Steev and Nick aren’t so sure putting it under the umbrella of largely innocuous attempts to derail discussion threads for a cheap and easy, angry reaction is really that suitable.

Has the term evolved or is it being hijacked where other, existing descriptions already exist?

Nick takes us back to his formative years to share a story about a llama, and relates it to the type of true stories told on The Moth podcast. This leads us to examine whether his tale could cut the mustard on the stage.

We also ponder whether anecdotes or verbal vignettes, which don’t always guarantee a tidy resolution or lesson learned, really fit in anywhere without the context of already knowing the storyteller.

Sometimes we can be wrong without even knowing we’re wrong, because the meaning we thought we knew turns out not the be the meaning at all. Whilst this could lead to potentially disastrous effects, Nick and Steev instead prefer to focus mainly on songs.

That is when they do actually focus on the topic and don’t find themselves distracted by social awkwardness; learning to drive; the movie Innerspace; or interruptions from a flaky broadband connection.

The makers of this podcast also wish to warn you there may be evidence of singing within this recording.

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day, Nick and Steev are back; and this time it’s time to talk about time.

Predictable chunks of time such as minutes, evenings and weeks can find a way of either running away from us or conversely wear out their welcome. For example: the long and possibly rose-tinted summer holidays of childhood stretched out ahead of us back then in a rather similar way to being trapped at a boring party now. Or worse still, a meeting.

The cud is chewed until the flavour has all gone and gets repackaged as supermarket value brand tea. We also manage to keep the language clean and Steev lets slip his billion-dollar vision for meetings of the future.